Hacker News Reader

Comment by goler | Hacker News Reader

“Today, according to Harvard, legacy students make up around 14 percent of the undergraduate population.”

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/04/663629750/legacy-admissions-o...

Which is 14 percent more than they should make up, at least if we are going to pretend that Harvard is interested in any reasonable standard of admissions. I understand the arguments for diversity in the student body; legacy admissions work against that goal. I understand the arguments for a strictly objective standard; legacy admissions work against that goal too.

Given that IQ seems to be >50% hereditary, wouldn’t we expect legacies to be over-represented in any meritocracy that partially selects for such a trait? I don’t think Harvard is a pure meritocracy, it’s more of a theoretical question.

> Given that IQ seems to be >50% hereditary,

You're kidding right? That is such a painfully incorrect statement. Intelligence is an incredibly complex hugely conserved trait. Bloodlines and power/intellect passed down through the generations is a great fantasy novel setting, but not so much for reality.

You are just wrong:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

I know it is ideologically uncomfortable but this is a fact you will have to get used to. Cognitive genomics is coming. The undeniable is becoming laughable to deny.

Have you considered the possibility that confounding variables exist? I have no doubt that coming from a family where your parents have received a good education makes it much more likely for you to personally also go on to get the same education for example. But these are different than the pure genetics by themselves. The Wikipedia article you link to yourself highlights the importance of how it defines the meaning of "heritability" that I think you should take a closer look at.

I'm sure at some point in the future, we will be able to genetically engineer our children to be smarter. Yet this is still a completely different idea compared to the paired mating of people which has currently been proposed. Intelligence is something that is incredibly complex, and humans are likely very close if not already at its peak within some local maxima.

>Have you considered the possibility that confounding variables exist? I have no doubt that coming from a family where your parents have received a good education makes it much more likely for you to personally also go on to get the same education for example.

Yes.

If you read the citations you will see this is based on twin adoption studies, which control for confounding variables almost perfectly.

I assure you, ever single objection you can think of off the top of your head has been raised and overcome.

The heritability of IQ is not a conclusion psychologists wanted to affirm. It is fact the field was forced to come to from the data, despite the ideological drifts of the last 50 years yearning (or in the case of Stephen Jay Gould outright falsifying data) for the opposite conclusion.

Psychology is a field notorious for being derided against as a soft science particularly because of how little data exists with poor sample sizes and ideology / purposeful tampering coming into the way like you've said.

Any meaningful evidence for a conclusion requires a much better understanding of the brain both biologically and also as a function of general cognition. This will require many more breakthroughs within the fields of biology and computer science. We're definitely getting closer and closer everyday on that front, but as of right now, the tools that we have access to are far too crude in my honest opinion.

Psychology in that respect is akin to the alchemy that was a precursor to chemistry. I'm not saying no real science was done by the alchemists of course, just that it was far and away from what the field of chemistry would ultimately become.

I sense this is a lost cause, but we can already predict ~10 percent of the variance in educational attainment with the genome alone.

Once we get data sets with millions of genomes tagged with their donors IQ, this number will rise. If we can predict, say, 60% of the variance in IQ (based on the genome alone) will you change you mind?

That is, what sort of data would change your mind?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3

Again, I'm not trying to dispute the fact that genes are the blueprints to our bodies.

The point I'm making is in regards to the OP's comment about how people coming from legacy will be much higher due to the fact that smart people reproducing with other smart people greatly increases the chances of producing a resultant smart baby. Random variation has much greater effect in determining the end result of that baby's genome is what I'm saying. You could have paired the person with almost any other human being, and the resultant IQ outcome would be no less likely to occur.

Only through concerted effort to discover and understand how the brain is constructed genetically in addition to developing methodologies for testing changes to those key markers will it be possible to meaningfully alter the statistics of intelligence. Anything else will be lost in the noise primarily because of, again, what I stated above. Intelligence of humans is likely already very close to some local maxima and it is also a highly conserved trait.

I used to believe everything you’ve stated until I dove into the twin studies, and more recently the GWAS data from Europe. Read the literature yourself with an open mind and you may be surprised. Ironically, as society has become more environmentally equal, ie the decline of lead, pollution, and clinical malnourishment, Nature has pulled even further ahead of Nurture, because it’s much easier to remove IQ points than to add them.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that intelligence is hereditary (not nearly as clear cut as you suggest). If Harvard's historical admissions policy was based on an applicant's intelligence, then they could use legacy as a proxy for intelligence in subsequent generations. Of course, if intelligence is only partially hereditary (as you suggested) then Harvard would do better to just apply some uniform standard of intelligence measurements to all applicants, assuming that the goal is to admit the most intellectually gifted students.

Of course it is well known that Harvard's historical admission policy was overtly antisemitic and generally racist, had nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence, and going back far enough was tied to the European Aristocracy. As a result the effect of legacy admissions is actually to perpetuate the effects of those historical policies. Rather than acting as a proxy for intelligence, legacy admissions act as a proxy for membership in a historically privileged class, and basically extends that privilege to the current generation.

>Of course, if intelligence is only partially hereditary (as you suggested) then Harvard would do better to just apply some uniform standard of intelligence measurements to all applicants, assuming that the goal is to admit the most intellectually gifted students.

Isn’t this the role of the SAT?

I’d be interested to see the data for legacy versus non-legacy SAT scores for applicants, admits, and matriculants.

I’m not defending Harvard’s current admissions policies nor their historical admissions policies, which seem indefensible by modern standards. My interest stems more from the theoretical implications of assortive mating for traits that are both very heriditary and very valued by society (or very deterministic of “success”.)

The SAT is not an intelligence test; it is a test of a student's educational background and the degree to which they engaged in college prep in the years leading up to the test. The fact that the 2/3 of the test is devoted to some measure of literacy should tell you that (literacy is an absurdly poor proxy for intelligence -- especially when it is confined to a specific language). Even the math section is in part a test of a student's educational background, as you must at least be familiar with the specific field of math and particular notation that the test uses.

There is a reason parents enroll their children in SAT prep as early as middle school and even elementary school. Again, let's assume intelligence is hereditary; then an ideal intelligence measurement would be impossible to prepare for, because it should measure something that a person cannot change about themselves (their genes). The fact that SAT prep measurably improves SAT scores says at least one of two things must be true: the SAT is not measuring an innate property, or that intelligence is not simply inherited.

(Spoiler alert: both of those are true.)

Of course you’re correct that test prep can skew the results, but SAT scores are still one of the best measures available at scale, hence why they are so widely used despite the obvious flaws. Other than a DNA test for IQ, you can prep for any known test, whether it’s the SAT, the WPPSI, the WISC-IV, a Rorschach, or the New York Times crossword. As user wycs hinted at elsewhere, a polygenetic spit test for raw IQ potential - the Gattica scenario - is likely not as far off as we believe; when that hits, it’s a whole new world (from pre-conception.)

Again, SAT scores are an extremely poor measurement of intelligence, because at best they only apply to people who (1) speak American English with complete fluency, (2) have literacy in English, and (3) have been taught the syntax, symbols, and particular fields of math tested in math section. Beyond that, since the modern SAT includes a writing section, there is a large subjective component of the score that further reduces its usefulness as a measure of intelligence. The SAT I took had no essay, but even the old test would have done a poor job of measuring the intelligence of someone who did not receive a high school education.

The actual purpose of the SAT is to screen students for a minimum educational background needed to complete a four-year degree at an American college. It only applies to a typical American education, and only to certain specific aspects of that education (there is no section on music, art, history, etc.).

They removed the writing section from the modern SAT, it's back to 1600 points.

I take it you're saying the SAT math section is a good measure of intelligence for all the kids that went to high school.

SAT is great at measuring who spent the most money / who goes to the best grade/high school but not a whole lot more than that.

You’re assuming that no children of Harvard alum would be qualified to get in even without legacy status. This is a woefully incorrect assumption.

Also note that a full 70% of legacies are denied admission. Being a legacy is hardly a golden ticket.

It is not that no legacy students would get in purely on their academic achievements or that being a legacy is a golden ticket. The legacy admission process seems to serve no reasonable purpose and to be in direct conflict with Harvard's other goals with its admissions process. It would be better to fill that 14 percent with randomly selected applicants -- at least that would given Harvard a control group to measure the impact of their admissions criteria against.

Is it not reasonable for Harvard to try to grow their endowment? If an alumnus wants to donate a new library or a new scholarship to Harvard, what's wrong with letting their kid attend, assuming she has the grades? The library or scholarship could benefit far more than what we lose by not admitting the one kid for the place the legacy took.

No, it is corrupt for Harvard to try to solicit donations by tipping the scale in favor of admitting the children of their alumni. "Assuming she has the grades" is exactly the problem here -- legacy admissions are not held to the same standard as everyone else and have an easier time gaining admission.

We are also not talking about "one kid," we are talking about 14 percent of their student body. Harvard does not get a new library or big donation for every one of the hundreds of legacies it admits each year. What is the cost/benefit analysis of having having such a large fraction of the incoming class held to a lower standard?

Harvard wouldn't have nearly the prestige that it does without legacy and purchased admissions.

Money is an effective tool to further almost any mission.

I'm not sure exactly what Harvard's mission statement is, but if the money that comes with a legacy student is enough, then taking on the student is almost certainly a good way to advance the mission.

LMFTFY: Harvard's admission process is corrupt and people can buy a spot for their children regardless of academic qualifications.

(Not claiming this is shocking news.)

You’re missing the notion of cultural continuity - legacy admissions support that effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com